Chapter XXX: Hard Pressed

It was on a dreary wet morning, laden with the very spirit of depression, that I led my little party of three across the fields to the Lone Farm. We had talked, or slept, out the night at the “Black Dog” in Market Grazing; and now, in grim fulfilment of the purpose which had brought us so far, were advancing to the assault of the inner abode of that mystery, whose final ramification had ended for us under the waterfall in far-away Piedmont. We numbered, besides myself, Mr Shapter and the two detectives. Johnny and Geoletti had stopped by the way in London, to provide us with the necessary correspondents in that prescriptive centre to all such operations.

We had hardly rested in our flight back from the Continent, since the finding of the inquest held upon those pitiful remains had supplied us with the _argumentum ad rem_ for procuring the extradition of Mr Mark Dalston; but, quick as we had travelled, the news of our presumptive mission had preceded us. For many reasons we should have preferred for the present to have throttled all journalistic gossip; but where was the lethal spot to be found in that myriad-necked Hydra? The story, or a travesty of it, leaked out and ran faster than we could, and was threatening us already, on our arrival in London, with a most undesired fame. The absurdest surmises were rife; the most ingenious inventions drawn upon to provide them. I have no time nor patience to stop and retail a fraction of the nonsense talked by the newspapers. The serious thing to us in it all was that it brought into a full glare of notoriety a case which, in its first processes, it was of the utmost importance should be kept secret. Signor Valombroso was, of course, as cutting as a whip upon the paradox involved. “Why do you not also publish portrait cards of your London detectives, with their character parts included?” he asked. “It would give the poor criminal yet one other chance.” He would have proposed a newspaper censorship as the remedy. But it was certainly aggravating. If it was true that Mr Dalston, having got wind somehow--perhaps through Mother Carey--of the trend of my inquiries, and being baffled in his designs on his victim, had already slipped into hiding, it was hardly probable that this public exposure and _esclandre_ would bring him out of it. The puzzling thing was that he should have left so vexatious a witness behind him at the Lone Farm; but, as to that, it had to be borne in mind that he was presumably unaware of her treachery to himself. In any case, hither had been our obvious direction from the moment of our landing.

I had written to Ira, while still in Italy, a full account of the discovery, with all its tragic incidents and consequences. Afterwards, arriving in London, I filled in the sheet with a brief account of our subsequent doings and present intentions, and posted it to her where she was staying with the family at Claridge’s Hotel. It was misery to be so near and apart; but the peremptoriness of my mission admitted of no delay; while the nature of our relations precluded any present thought of a meeting under the Skene ægis.

But how desolate seemed the country, void of the consciousness of that young darling presence in it. I could almost welcome the dripping skies, the sodden fields, the deathly soak and stillness, as things attuned to a mood abandoned of love and shivering under a sort of creeping paralysis of terror. For how could I forget for a moment the relations in which I stood towards the unhappy woman of whom it was the very purpose of our visit to make a traitor and informer? She had borne children to him. I was not the only fruit of her motherhood. I could not but feel my part somehow an execrable one; and most in its self-consciousness of a still-existing repugnance towards the object of our schemes, which was surely unnatural, but which I could not, for all my striving, overcome. Was not this, indeed, one of the bitterest features of a bitter tragedy? At the present moment, even, my thoughts, for all the filial warmth and graciousness they could command, turned instinctively to Lady Skene.

The foreboding solemnity of my mood seemed to impart itself to my companions. We plashed and plodded along the field paths with hardly a word to exchange amongst us. Inspector Jannaway, it is true, had his own reasons for reserve. Holding the very tangible fact of a warrant for Mr Dalston’s arrest in his pocket, he seemed bent on leaving it to his Italian colleague to justify its production. “Let him have his head, gentlemen. He knows all about it. He’s agoing to prove the superiority of his system over ours. Very well; I’m not the man to interfere--not just yet awhile, anyway.” He did not speak these words, but his attitude unmistakably expressed them. He was a great English detective on the high horse, aggrieved by insolent comparisons. Let Valombroso have our confidence; let all fools have their paradise. We should find ourselves on the wrong side of ours in due time. When we wanted him--and we should want him--he was here at our service. In the meantime, he kept his thoughts--and his theories, if he had any--to himself, and acquiesced passively and pleasantly in all that was suggested. But he offered no suggestions of his own.

A dive through a dripping copse, a final flounder along a little muddy lane, brought us into view of the house. It was certainly entitled to its name--a lonely haunted tenement, flung away into the fields to rot and perish of its own reputation. The fabric of it dated from the Tudors, but it had been patched and shored with a number of unseemly anachronisms, until it looked like a crippled house on crutches. Old barns, old byres, an old dove-cot, toppled hard by to their fall. The only modern feature about it was the filth, which discharged in one place its moister particles into a little green duck pond with no ducks in it. The house itself was half buried in trees, through which one caught a glimpse of a considerable garden to the rear, full of vegetables, but neglected. Tradition pointed to the farm as a refuge, during the Marian persecutions, of a number of non-juring ministers, who had nevertheless come to be routed out and despatched to the flames for their obduracy. It was certainly quarried with vaults, and priests’ holes, and other such sanctuaries of the desperate.

“H’m!” muttered Mr Shapter, with his hand on the bell. “A very warren this, I shouldn’t be surprised. What do you think, Jannaway?”

“I think as you think, sir,” answered the detective serenely.

Shapter turned away impatiently. The clang of the bell answering from those bowels of silence made us all start. And, almost with the cessation of its deep voice, she stood in the opening of the door before us.

The same mean sapless figure; the same unmoving face, worn and unwholesome, and scored with its grey lines of suffering or endurance. Only the eyes in it lived--the eyes of the “_petite_ demoiselle, so white and pink.” I could not picture it--I could not. Age has no past for youth--no memory of joys like its own. I shrank before the fire of those eyes; but their vision had no direction--not even for me. They looked beyond us all.

Valombroso swept off his hat, and returned it to his head, being careful of the tilt.

“Good-morning, madama,” he said. “Is your husband at home? We desire the honour of a word with him.”

“You have come to arrest him?”

The voice was as lifeless as the face.

“Madama is too precipitate,” answered the detective. “A word is not necessarily a warrant.”

“I have always been waiting for it to come,” she went on, in the same cold low tone, and with the same hot vision always challenging something beyond us that we could not see. “I have always expected and lived for this moment. Now, is it not in the eternal curse of things that it has come too late? Too precipitate. O, yes! too precipitate.”

She gave a frozen little laugh--horrible, because the muscles of her mouth, the breath of her bosom did not seem to stir to it.

“He killed my husband, my dear first love, did he not?” she asked.

Not one of us could find words to answer her.

“O, I know it!” she said. “I have always known it. Voices and visions used to come to me--they were for ever coming. One was of a little child I bore; but it went, and I knew then that it was not of the dead. Only the dead speak to me. The others are like murmurs behind a wall. I hear them as the dead hear the steps and laughter overhead. He killed him out of love of me--he struck him through my heart and killed my heart. The rest was his to take. He could not gain back what he had killed. His will was strong, but that was beyond it. And he made a passionate wooer, too. But it wanted more than his warmth to melt that dead stone of my heart. The children of his passion--they were born with the chill of it on them, and they too died, one by one.”

Not once did her voice rise above that lifeless current of sound. She stood like one speaking in an hypnotic trance, compelled to say the things she said. Now, in a pause, Valombroso spoke again:

“Will madama explain what she means by its being too late?”

Her eyes came down to him, with the strangest challenge.

“Did you know him, and think to take him so easily? Look where you will; you will not find him here.”

“We shall avail ourselves very fully of your permission, madam,” said Mr Shapter civilly. “It obviates for us the unpleasant necessity to fall back upon our search warrant. Mr Dalston is gone, then, you say. Will you perhaps acquaint us where?”

“He is gone abroad--a long journey. I have a letter from him. You can see it if you like.”

She turned and led the way into the house, and we all followed her into a low dark inky-panelled sitting-room. Melancholy green light flowed in here through a wide lozenge-paned window at the back. A round-headed bush was stooped to the glass outside, as if listening with its ear to it. It was an unchancy creepy place, and shudderingly cold.

We exchanged some significant glances while the unhappy woman was searching a bureau for the letter. Crazed--that was their common implication; and perhaps by reason of her madness spared much. It was very pitiful.

Presently she found what she sought, and brought it to us. Our heads crowded together to read it. It was indisputably his, couched in affectionate terms, and dated from some port in Spain, a week back. It related the writer’s sudden inducement to seize a business chance which had offered, talked of a short absence, and gave some directions for his wife’s abandonment of the farm and withdrawal to a certain address in London, which was mentioned. Valombroso, finishing with it, shrugged his shoulders and handed the sheet on to Jannaway, who put it in his pocket.

“It is very well, then. And now, with your permission, madama, we will get to work,” said the Italian.

She answered not a word, but stood leaning on the desk, and looking strangely after us as we trooped out of the room. Mr Shapter, leading us across the passage, halted in a little dull study which had presumably been the master’s, and faced the detectives with a question--“Well?”

Valombroso shrugged his shoulders again; Inspector Jannaway did and said nothing.

“Come,” said the lawyer impatiently to the former. “Is the letter in your opinion genuine?”

“In-con-test-abilmente, signore.”

“Then it is no good our searching here?”

“Very like, but we must search nevertheless. He may have gone and come back. I say only this: Show me once my man, and I go for him.”

Jannaway uttered a curious sound. If his face had not been so immovable. I should have taken it for a laugh. Mr Shapter glanced at him sharply.

“You seem amused, Inspector Jannaway,” he said.

“Do I, sir?” answered the detective. “I have to seem a lot of things in the course of my duty.”

Shapter flounced his shoulders slightly, and turned away.

“The sooner we get to business the sooner we shall satisfy ourselves,” he said. “Come.”

We left the room together, but outside, by the lawyer’s advice, separated, and took each his independent direction--as one the living rooms, one the offices and cellars, and a third the attics. Inspector Jannaway decided, on his own initiative, for the grounds and ruined outbuildings.

Our search, as might have been expected, yielded us no human quarry--not so much as a scullery-maid. Mrs Dalston, it appeared, existed, for whatever reason, the sole tenant of this remote and dismal homestead.

But, if the place was void of any sign or shadow of what we sought, the voices of a hundred unseen demons seemed to people it. They rang in peals of laughter up the stairs; they answered mockingly to one’s tap on hollow panels; they rose in reverberant boomings from the cellars, and echoed away down dark passages to a scampering of tiny feet. When, by-and-by, we reassembled in the hall, Valombroso’s instant utterance spoke, I think, the common feeling:

“God of mercy, signore! there is only one way to penetrate the secrets of this house--and that is to pull it down.”

He wiped his white face with a ball of handkerchief. Inspector Jannaway’s appeared the only composed countenance amongst us. But even his answered with a momentary pallor to the shock of a sudden screech of laughter uttered hard by. It came, or seemed to come, from the room where we had left Mrs Dalston. Mr Shapter, after a second’s paralysis, turned the handle of the door resolutely, and we all looked in. She was standing still where we had left her. A handkerchief was in her hand. Her bosom was rising and falling in hard pants.

“Great God, madam!” said the lawyer. “Was it you made that noise?”

She gave no answer--she seemed fighting for breath--but presently she spoke:

“You have not found him, then?”

“Not yet; but we shall come again; we have not finished.”

“It is open to you, now and always,” she said, still with difficulty. “I am at your service; we are all here at your service.”

_We?_

I shivered in the thought of those viewless colleagues of hers. A vision of the cheery inn where we had quartered ourselves suddenly rose before me, before us all, I think, irresistibly attractive. It would be possible only in some such healthy commonplace to resolve upon reason and a course of action. Without another word, we turned and left the house.

We must have walked half-a-mile, I believe, before any one of us spoke; and then it was Inspector Jannaway, answering a mute appeal of the lawyer’s eyes.

“Mad, sir,” he said. “As mad as a hatter.”